Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction

   • Alice Reeve-Tucker, Nathan Waddell

   Pages 1-18

3. The Point of It

   • Douglas Mao

   Pages 19-38

4. A Likely Impossibility: The Good Soldier, the Modernist Novel, and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

   • Scott W. Klein

   Pages 39-55

5. Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the ‘Postwar-to-end-war World’

   • Nathan Waddell

   Pages 56-73

6. Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

   • Nick Hubble

   Pages 74-92

7. Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

   • Elizabeth English

   Pages 93-110

8. Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism: Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

   • Glyn Salton-Cox

   Pages 111-129

9. The Role of Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Imaginary Numbers in Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

   • Nina Engelhardt

   Pages 130-147

10. The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Leisure in the Age of Mechanized Hospitality

    • Shawna Ross

    Pages 148-167

11. ‘Seeing beneath the formlessness’: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

    • David James

    Pages 168-181

12. Uncovering the ‘gold-bearing rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

    • Caroline Edwards

    Pages 182-203

13. Back Matter

    Pages 204-226

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Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

• English literature
• fiction
• Modernism
• novel
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Birmingham, UK

  Alice Reeve-Tucker

• University of Nottingham, UK

  Nathan Waddell

Caroline Edwards, University of Lincoln, UK Nina Engelhardt, University of Edinburgh, UK Elizabeth English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Nick Hubble, Brunel University, UK David James, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Scott W. Klein, Wake Forest University, USA Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University, USA Alice Reeve-Tucker, University of Birmingham, UK Shawna Ross, Arizona State University, USA Glyn Salton-Cox, postgraduate researcher, USA Nathan Waddell, University of Nottingham, UK

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